One word

Excellence is beyond what we can imagine.

Mathematically my idea of excellence is like a function in a different dimension. I contrast this to what I see most people think of excellence as. Mathematically I'd describe their views as an asymptote (something we approach but never reach).

I've agreed to be a landcrew (support) for an upcoming endurance kayaking event (race time ~ 9 hours). The person I'm landcrewing for knows the race well, has set records and paddles their boat more than 99% of people. They've done enough training to do well. We're currently debating the merits of a 40km paddle this weekend.

I asked if they had detailed lists, and they said yes, I said I hadn't seen them. They assured me they know what they're going to do. In a race where everything goes to plan, your landcrew is not needed (even over nine hours). In a race that doesn't go perfectly to plan, the more the asymmetry in knowledge between the two people, the more frustrated we all become, and the slower the overall time. Every second you're stopped is almost impossible to catch up.

The way most experienced people solve the issue of asymmetry of knowledge is for their landcrew to carry everything they might need, the participant turns up, takes what they want and the landcrew packs everything to go to the next checkpoint. You over-prepare to be prepared. You write longer lists. You buy a better label maker. At some point you'll either run out of space or energy. Some people just buy a bigger vehicle. You'll need to decide when spares of spares are excessive.

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We see a parallel in the analytics profession: most of the time, the work is based on the idea that everything will go well and that the other departments don't need to know what's going on. Occasionally, you'll work with someone who does the equivalent of writing everything on a list. They're the person who has 50 extra slides at the end of the presentation for any question you might ask.

You could think about how you feel in the two different scenarios, either as the landcrew or in the workplace. I'd rather think about what excellence might mean. It's not writing better lists, or having more slides at the end; it's a world you can't imagine.

We could spend 90 minutes going through this exercise in a workshop, slowly working towards the idea and feeling inclusive. I'll just tell you the answer, and then we can do the workshop.

It's one word. That's 'excellence'.

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What? That makes no sense. I return to my first point - excellence is beyond what we can imagine; it's in a different dimension.

The idea is that by saying one word, both parties know exactly what the situation is. There's a shared understanding beyond the glib and obvious. I describe it as like turning to a page in a book—a book we've both memorised.

In the example of the kayaking event, the one word tells me as the landcrew how the event is going, what is working, what is not, if there are problems with the boat etc. I know exactly what I need to do all in a split second. This is better than what most Olympians are doing.

The work required to get to this point? Incomprehensible.

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Excellence is beyond our imagination.

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You're probably not landcrewing an endurance kayaking race. How does the one word idea apply to the analytics profession? Imagine instead of spending most of the meeting explaining what's happening you had a shared understanding from just one word? Everyone would know about data quality, the analysis that was conducted and the conclusions. You could then spend the meeting talking about the decision and outcomes. Maybe you look at a specific visualisation and go through a few data points.

How would you do this? You'd need your analytics team to define all the possible outcomes (think pages of a book). They never will because excellence is beyond our imagination. Once you have these outcomes defined, you'd have the analytics team work with the other departments over years to train them in this understanding. This training would refine and improve what each word means. The analytics team knows a lot less than they think they do about how the business uses data.

This idea becomes profound at the senior executive level. The current approach is to write longer briefing notes, add more detail, and overwhelm everyone. There's the obvious parallel to the landcrew that keeps bringing more stuff because they don't know what will be needed. You can think of all this pre-meeting work like packing a trailer full of stuff.

You could have meetings in minutes if you embraced my idea of excellence.

The one word idea would work in customer service. Instead of 'handing over the customer' you say one word and everyone knows exactly what's happened. Are they frustrated? Can we solve their problem? What needs to be done? All conveyed in one word.

If you wanted to make this fun, you could choose your words from compound curse words. I wouldn't recommend this.

If you think this is too hard and want the cut-down, 'quick wins' version, go back and keep using your poorly constructed dashboards and tell me how they're going. No one reads or understands them, so you made them longer?

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When excellence is beyond what we can imagine, I guess what we get is Harris Farm asking about transaction accuracy, Think with Google writing meaningless articles or DFAT sending you a notification on your passport with insufficient time to do anything about it.

Compound curse words: https://www.dhirubhai.net/posts/drandrewpratley_im-good-at-making-friends-on-linkedin-activity-7237600755279347712-WNbA

Harris Farm transaction accuracy: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/how-many-phds-do-you-need-answer-survey-question-dr-andrew-pratley-nxljc/

Think with Google: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/hey-google-dr-andrew-pratley-htdnc

DFAT and passport expiry: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/passport-expiry-dr-andrew-pratley-nqa2c